stood up and towered over me.
“Now you’re making me sore, Paul. You’d take what a soldier on the battlefield says when he’s just lost a pal, and you’d put it in a police file? Not only is that a dirty trick, it’s a dumb one—and I took you for a smarter guy than that. You were there, weren’t you? You must know that just to keep some shred of sanity men let off steam by saying any number of things. But by the time we came home, the last thing we wanted was to settle old scores. I’d no interest in meeting up with Watt. He was a business story, and I was on the crime beat. To hell with him.”
“Sounds to me like you’re still mad at him. Was his clothing disarranged when you got there?”
“No, but I just never could resist petting stiffs.”
With that, Ivan strode out of the small office and disappeared behind the stairwell door. It was a fine exit, and I decided not to ruin it by giving chase.
Chapter Two
Before leaving the editor’s private office, I picked up his telephone and asked for an outside line. When I rang Bell and gave them my badge number, they were able to confirm one call from a public booth on the west side of Sheppard Street to the Broadview Avenue home of subscriber I. A. MacAllister, which call commenced at 1:44 a.m. and lasted less than a minute. Also a call at 1:51 of similar duration from MacAllister’s residence to the Danforth Dollar Taxi Service. As they had informed me often enough before, the phone company had no record of the content of these conversations or the identity of the parties involved. I always asked, ever hopeful as well as fearful about the progress of snooping.
My next call was to Danforth Dollar Taxi. They claimed to have received a request for a car at 1:51 from a man calling himself Ivan MacAllister. Driver Tony Bellotto promptly proceeded from the company depot at Danforth and Pape to 786 Broadview Avenue and at 2:01 picked up a fare identifying himself as Ivan MacAllister. Said fare was let off at 96 Adelaide Street West at 2:14.
Sounded like speeding, but let that go.
Yet another phone call revealed Morris Watt to be at the office rather than at home, so I deferred the pleasure of a visit to Glen Road. From the Examiner Building up to 96 Adelaide West was too short a stroll to allow for heavy-duty thinking. Instead, I gawked like any rube at all the construction. Since well before the war, Toronto had been putting up skyscrapers with as many as twelve or fifteen floors, but even downtown these towers were still the exception. Four storeys was about as high as you could go without attracting attention or requiring an elevator. Watt’s building had six.
It was on the north side of the street, and the patch of pavement where Digby Watt had fallen was bathed in sunshine. No blood had spilled onto the concrete. There was nothing to mark the spot. The sight of brogues and oxfords, pumps and workboots tramping over it held me a moment, fascinated. It put me in mind of a phrase beloved of military chaplains, something about this being the way worldly glory passes. Pedestrian traffic was certainly picking up as the City Hall clock struck noon. Men in suits were on the march from their offices to their clubs, while their secretaries trotted off to the sandwich shops to pick up something they could take back to their desks. A couple of bank branches and a shoe repair were also pulling in their share of lunch-hour traffic. It would be a lonely street at night, though. No theatres or cinemas, no houses or apartments. No late night cafés. If you shot someone here after midnight with a modest-sized gun, you wouldn’t even need a silencer.
I stepped briefly around the corner of the building onto Sheppard Street to have a look at the phone from which someone had called Ivan’s apartment at 1:44. There was nothing much to see, just an ordinary wooden phone booth with a black coin-phone inside. I poked around the gum wrappers on the floor to see if our caller might have left something personal behind—a hand-written note would have been swell—but there was nothing doing. It was too late to have the handset dusted for fingerprints. It had been too late at 2:45 a.m., the moment the constable had used this phone to call in the medical examiner instead of taking the two dozen extra steps to the nearest police call box. I reminded myself that constables weren’t trained or paid enough to worry about such things. But why had there been no detective on the scene?
I tightened my necktie and went back to Adelaide Street and in through the double brass doors of number 96.
From the directory in the lobby, it was clear to any reader of the financial pages that every occupant had something to do with the Watt business empire, yet neither the building itself nor any of the individual concerns bore his name. Atkins Hardware headed the list, followed by Beaconsfield Power, Canada Ski and Snowshoe, and so down through the alphabet. “P” was represented by Peerless Kitchen Appliances. Unlike the Examiner Building, 96 Adelaide had no concierge or commissionaire to make enquiries of, and I was momentarily at a loss as to how to find my man Morris. If I had to guess, I thought I’d take a chance on Dominion Consolidated Holdings, which had a certain managerial ring. Suite 402.
When the elevator came down and deposited another clutch of lunch-goers in the lobby, the operator was able to confirm my choice. He was a man of about my age with black hair slicked straight back like a jazz-band player and a right arm that ended above the elbow. I thought it would have been more convenient for him to turn about, but he plainly preferred not to unsettle his passengers by staring at them and reached across his body with his left hand to operate the controls. On arrival at the fourth floor, I did not get out right away.
“Were you on duty last night when Mr. Digby Watt left the building?”
Turning, the operator saw the police identification I was holding up. “I leave at six, sir, and come back on at eight in the morning.”
“How many times in a normal week would he stay later than six?”
“He was always in before I got here and after I left. The only time I’d see him would be when he had an outside appointment during the day.”
I saw the car was rated for a maximum of twelve passengers.
“Would you,” I asked, “always notice when he rode with your?”
“Notice?” The man’s grin showed a mouthful of tobacco-stained teeth. “He never rode with me without speaking to me, no matter who he was with. And it wasn’t just the ‘How are you, Harold?’ you get from people who couldn’t care less. Usually, he’d ask me about the hockey game, but if we were alone in the car he might try to persuade me to let him fit me out with some new artificial arm he’d heard about. I always told him I’d rather not, unless he thought a war amputee made people uncomfortable and was bad for business. ‘Not a bit of it,’ he’d say. ‘Harold, you did the Empire proud in France, and I don’t care who knows it.’ ”
The car was being summoned to the sixth floor.
“You’ll miss him, Harold,” I said.
The operator’s mouth tightened. “I thought we were through having good men shot. Hope you get the S.O.B. that did it.”
The fourth-floor receptionist, a grey-haired woman in pince-nez spectacles, sat behind a desk loaded with communication equipment, including a wax-cylinder Dictaphone and an intercom of the speaker and mike variety. I was surprised when instead of using the latter to announce my arrival she rose from her place, puffing a little as if her corset were laced too tight.
She showed me into a well-equipped office of modest dimensions and austere decor. Mushroom-grey would have been too garish a description of the wall colour. The window faced north and was covered by a Venetian blind, closed plainly more for privacy than shade. A second door
